Ideas of power in feminist theory

Abstract

As Alison Jaggar pointed out, the second wave of feminism was a social and theoretical movement that shifted the analysis from the logics of rights and equality —an intrinsic feature of the first wave— towards those of oppression and liberation. So while the debates on justice were prominent in some of the most influential feminist theoretical discussions of the recent years, power has become a central issue, maybe the issue, of contemporary feminism and therefore a key concept for feminist theories; notwithstanding this concept was present in these theories in a rather more implicit than explicit way since the decade of 1980. The centrality of this concept, as well as the characteristic pluralism of feminism, produces the need to identify the different understandings of power currently in use. This paper suggests a typology of feminist perspectives on power based on reviewing some of the key contributions in this field over the last four decades. Amy Allen’s work focusing on the power over and power to categories is the starting (although discussed) point for this task. The resulting typology defines four perspectives of power originated in the second wave (power as resource, domination, freedom and care) and revisited since the decade of 1990 in connection with other debates such as that of the political subject. In the end, this paper aims to clarify the different and often contradictory theoretical strategies of feminism and to show what these ideas can contribute to a critical conceptualization of power.